How to Make Your Ductless Air Conditioner a Smart AC

Imagine finally having a chance to change the way you control your air conditioner. No more rolling of knobs. No more need to personally crank the thermostat up and down. And you don’t even have to be home either. You can be at your office or on the road. Or farther away. You can be out-of-state. Or you can be anywhere in the world, wondering if you’ve left your AC on. What if you don’t have to sweat it out anymore? What if all you have to do is push a button from your smartphone? What if you have a Smart Air Conditioner?

Comfort at Your Fingertips

Experience teaches us that any amount of genuine sense of comfort requires a certain degree of control, and the same can be said when choosing the best climate control system inside our own homes. In this day and age when automation becomes the norm, one of the most touted HVAC advances is wireless control; the capability to manage and control your home temperature directly from smart devices. And what have upended the old ways and brought us to this age of disruptive innovations? What gives us this exciting time when we can just simply push a button from our smart phone or tablet to turn the AC on, control the thermostat, and cool the house even before we get home? Two words: The Internet. Connectivity.

IoT: Redefining Your HVAC Comfort

The unbridled rise of Internet of Things (IoT)—a concept that aptly describes the current state of connected devices and the surge of digitization in all facets of human lifestyle and enterprise—would have no way of escaping the singular thing that points most to our need for comfort right inside our abodes—home HVAC.

IoT pertains to the extended use of the power of the internet outside the traditional computing systems (like desktop computers and laptops) toward integration with smart mobile devices. The result is a vast network of internet-enabled devices which are connected together and allow for easier distribution of data and communication. Home automation or the creation of smart homes where typical home devices, such as thermostat, lighting, fire alarms, appliances, garage doors, and even doorbells are integrated together into one system, enabling centralized and wireless control. Just imagine being able to control all of the various devices, appliances, and other contraptions inside your home via a single remote controller or through your smart mobile device. It is not surprising that one of the most popular automation devices that really gained traction in the consumer market is a smart home device—the Nest Thermostat that came out in 2011.

Providing a compelling example of the success of home automation (and IoT in a larger context), the Nest Thermostat redefined convenience and showed the way how a new and better experience of temperature comfort can be achieved without costing you much time, effort, and energy. By 2020, it is projected that at least 50 billion networks of connected devices will be created and deployed in various types of home, industrial, and enterprise environments. And the Internet continues to converge everything, still. "It will be part of your presence all the time," said Alphabet’s Executive Chairman and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, according to CNET in one of its feature reports about the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It is in the same forum where Schmidt remarkably, and quite intriguingly, said that "the Internet will disappear," referring, of course, to how the Internet will blur the line between the virtual and real because the internet will become very much part of our everyday lives. "Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room," Schmidt said in the same forum.

True enough, the Internet is keeping all things together in a single system and reshaping the way we use and interact with the physical devices around us. Now, everything goes smart. Aside from smart phones, you’ve heard of smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities, smart cars, smart watch, and other smart things. You name it, it could be designed smartly. There’s just no limit what the IoT can do.

This, essentially, changes the way we communicate and interact with people and experience all the ease of comfort that we’re seeking to achieve. Yes, the last couple of years have been remarkable for the IoT, but not an easy one either due to the rise of security and privacy concerns. Even so, the creation of smart and integrable devices did not wane a bit.

In the HVAC world, smart air conditioners are a just a single node of connected devices, but just as significant when we try to view the development based on how far we’ve come since Willis Haviland Carrier brought us the first taste of temperature comfort in 1902. The smart air conditioner is certainly the new big thing, and IoT is paving the path to how we can completely achieve control over our comfort in a way that we can’t possibly imagine before. Through the power of the internet, smart cooling and heating systems can now be controlled, monitored, and maintained through smart phones and other connected smart devices.

A smart air conditioner is certainly the new big thing, and IoT is paving the path to how we can completely achieve control over our comfort in a way that we can’t possibly imagine before. Through the power of the internet, smart cooling and heating systems can now be controlled, monitored, and maintained through smart phones and other connected smart devices. And with the array of available air conditioners, nothing is more built for automation than the most innovative, energy-efficient, and powerful cooling and heating solutions today—the ductless mini split systems.

Ductless Mini Splits: Air Conditioners Made Smart

Inherently feature-rich and ultra-high efficient and powerful, ductless mini split systems undeniably carry the hallmarks of a highly evolved and more sophisticated air-conditioning system that is a perfect match for automation. As an example, here are the typical capabilities of a ductless air conditioner:

Control the unit from your smart device. Wi-Fi-enabled, the system can be connected and accessed from your smart phone and tablet through the installed Smart app.

Choose your desired room temperature. Featuring a multi-operational mode, the controller provides you with the option of setting your unit into any of the available operational modes: heat, cool, dry, fan only, and auto.

Set the unit to operate for a specific period of time. Built with a timer, the unit can be programmed to run or turn off depending on a set amount of time.

Secure the unit with a touch of a button. Designed with a privacy lock mode, you can set the unit’s security feature to prevent unauthorized access to the system.

Turn on the sleep mode. Using the available sleep modes, you have the option to adjust the room’s temperature during your sleep. This will enable you to save energy consumption without affecting your comfort level.

Conveniently read the temperature from the controller. Featuring a large backlit LCD display, you can program the controllers to display the temperature reading in °F or °C. consumption.

Sense and control the temperature at the remote controller instead of at the indoor unit. Designed with the sensor function, the unit can be programmed to adjust the airflow and temperature based on what is sensed by the remote controller.

Smart Controls for Your Automation-ready Ductless Mini Split Building on the existing smart capabilities of advanced air conditioners like ductless mini split systems, some add-on AC control tools are made available to enable the deployment of wireless remote access, control, management, and maintenance.

Among these accessories designed to create a smart system out of non-connected but automation-ready AC units are the sensor-equipped and Wi-Fi-enabled smart AC control devices like the Honeywell D6 Thermostat. If you have a ductless mini split that is Wi-Fi Capable, the Honeywell D6 Controller will seamlessly connect and make your mini split "smart-home compatible. Essentially, this smart AC control enables you to achieve the following:

Control your cooling and heating systems anytime, from anywhere.

Lower your energy consumption and gain a projected savings of up to 40% on your electric costs.

Enjoy personalized comfort by setting your AC to operate different levels of temperatures at different times of the day.

Own a smart system that cools down even before you get home and turns off when no one is inside the room.

Have instant and constant access to important information that relates to your system’s operations—from temperature to projected savings.

Use a smart system that is capable of connecting to the Cloud (through your home Wi-Fi)

Control your different cooling and heating systems at home via just one app.

Connect your AC to your automated home infrastructure.

Control other devices and services

Integrate all your home smart solutions, including your HVAC system, to create a smart home.

It is worth mentioning that like most smart products, the Honeywell D6 Controller is an evolving system and undergoes constant development. As an IoT device, it is designed to adapt other smart capabilities and features. A roadmap for development is currently available, which include among other things wider system support, apps optimization, greater interoperability with other smart devices, localization, and some other personalization features.